A casual stroll through an East Texas oilfield on a bright, moonlit evening ended with the barrel of a Smith and Wesson pressed to Larry Wansley’s head as he stood next to a freshly dug grave.

Wansley can’t pinpoint the exact moment he made the decision to leave undercover work behind. But the sound of whirring rigs and the smell of loam as a corrupt sheriff led the FBI agent to his reckoning remain vivid.

More than 45 years later, Wansley is the director of corporate security for the Dallas Cowboys. His son, Bryan, manages the groundbreaking program he initiated.

Here was Wansley’s charge when he was hired by Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm in the 1980s: When the players are on the field, they are Tom Landry’s responsibility. As soon as they come off the field, they’re yours.

The man who got his start as a police detective in Compton proceeded to establish one of the NFL’s first player support systems, a program that has evolved into what clubs now call Player Development. Wansley initiated security protocols with the Cowboys that have been adopted around the league and devised the security program used by the Cowboys Cheerleaders on their international travels.

Wansley talks about this and much more in his autobiography, “Tough Streets, Rough Skies and Sunday Sidelines.” The book, written by former Dallas Morning News reporter Carlton Stowers, comes out next month.

The movie rights to his first book, which was published in 1989, were purchased and Denzel Washington was cast to play the former FBI agent before the project fell apart. Wansley coordinated the protection detail for pop star Whitney Houston during her European tour, a job that was the premise for the movie “The Bodyguard” starring Kevin Costner.

It’s all flattering. But in many ways, Wansley’s life mirrors that of Forrest Gump. He’s the throughline that runs from the Watts riots to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst to the death threat that Landry received during a Monday Night Football broadcast. He worked for Houston, notified the FBI on the morning of 9/11 that Flight 11 was missing and presumably hijacked in his role as Global Security Director for American Airlines, and was the architect of the passenger screening model adopted by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in the wake of that tragic day.

The 83-year-old Wansley sat down with The News for a series of interviews this month to reflect on his remarkable journey. Many of the stories he recounts have been part of the public record for years. He’s only at liberty to divulge bits and pieces of others and is limited in discussing one case involving ticket fraud because some charges are still pending.

Wansley wants to pay tribute to his family, knowing he put them through hell when he was undercover. He does the same for the victims of 9/11 and the first responders he witnessed at Ground Zero. He thanks Schramm, Landry, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and Bob Crandall, the former president and chairman of American Airlines, for their trust and guidance.

“All sacrificed and contributed to making me who I am,” Wansley said.

A double life

Wansley was part of the Compton police department during the Watts riots. A few years later he took a job with the FBI and wound up in the San Antonio field office, focusing on fraudulent checks.

Hearst, the granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by a group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. There were only a handful of Black agents in the FBI at the time. Wansley said the bureau assembled five to go undercover and infiltrate the SLA to find where Hearst was hidden.

“From that point on, I made my bones doing that,” he said. “That became my life.”

When the case was done, he assumed the identity of a high-profile con man, Lawrence Keaton. He said he led a flamboyant lifestyle with a ritzy apartment in Beverly Hills. He wore fancy clothes, drove an expensive car and made the rounds on the celebrity circuit.

Larry Wansley lived 35 to 40 miles away in Simi Valley with his wife and two small children in a neighborhood of cops, firefighters and teachers. He had to create a cover story every time he snuck away to see them for a couple days, usually involving a trip to Phoenix or St. Louis for business before slowly working his way back to California. He carried a pager in case someone in his alternate life tried to get ahold of him to make a deal.

The family couldn’t leave the house when he did visit. The children, Bryan and Robben, didn’t understand.

“I would show up and it would frighten the kids,” Wansley said. “I had a deal with my wife that I would leave the other guy outside.

“But I looked different. I had long hair and a full beard. I intimidated them. And more and more, that other personality would blend with my own.”

One of the cases Wansley worked brought down Academy Award-winning actors and producers. Nice people, Wansley said. They just happened to be crooks. He declines to mention names.

The bureau would periodically bring their undercover agents from around the country together in Quantico to share notes and receive additional training. Wansley became close with an agent working cases on the East Coast named Joe Pistone, whose undercover name was Donnie Brasco.

Pistone’s story was made into a movie starring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. Depp played Pistone. When Wansley began talking about getting out of undercover for the sake of his family, Pistone suggested he relocate outside of Dallas where he and his family lived.

A threat and a bottle of Jack

Wansley made it clear when he met Bill Hinshaw, the squad supervisor in Dallas, that he wanted to wean himself off undercover work. Hinshaw told him he respected that but asked him to review a case they had on a corrupt sheriff in Gregg County.

The two went to lunch after Wansley reviewed the file and Hinshaw asked if he would reach out to other agents he knew around the country to see if they were interested. Wansley made a few calls and got back to his supervisor later in the afternoon to say no one could do it.

“This case has your name written all over it,” Hinshaw told him.

“Yeah, it does,” Wansley replied. “You know I’m hooked.”

The next day he was back in Los Angeles to pick up an ID and a brand new Cadillac to drive to Texas. His cover: He’s once again Keaton, a wheeler-dealer from California who’s the front guy for a mob group in Las Vegas looking to do business in Longview. He hears Sheriff Tom Welch is the man to see.

The two quickly strike up a business arrangement. Wansley gets the message one evening that Welch wants to meet. Two deputies pick him up and take him to an oilfield in Kilgore where Welch is waiting.

Welch has heard that Wansley is cutting side deals and the sheriff’s upset that he’s not getting his cut. Welch tells him it’s bad for his reputation and he can’t have that.

The two stop walking once they reach the grave. Welch pulls out his gun.

Wansley runs through the possibilities. If he said his mob buddies will take revenge, Welch won’t be threatened. He runs that part of the state. They would never get to him. If Wansley tells him he’s an FBI agent, Welch and his deputies will only bury him deeper.

Wansley went with option No. 3. He got in Welch’s face, cursed him out and dared him to shoot him.

“Are you going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg?” Wansley screamed. “Are you that stupid?”

Welch looked at Wansley. A smile slowly spread across his face.

“I guess we don’t have to have this conversation anymore, do we,” Welch said.

When Wansley got back to the apartment he rented in town, he couldn’t stop shaking. He opened a bottle of Jack Daniels, took out a water glass, filled it to the top and drank the whole thing.

He passed out.

A few days later, the raid came down. Federal charges were filed against Welch and 20 other officials.

The trial was front-page news in Tyler and Longview and other newspapers across the state. On the night the jury reached a guilty verdict, one of the defendants hung himself in his jail cell.

The job interview

Wansley was juggling five identities at this point. He was still bringing cases to a close on the West Coast and

Why did he gravitate to this life? How could he keep doing this to his family?

The call that changed the trajectory of his career came from an NFL security representative named Charlie Jackson. The Cowboys were conducting a nationwide search for someone with a background in law enforcement and he wanted to know if Wansley was interested.

A couple of days later, Schramm called and asked Wansley to drop by his home. He showed up around 2 on a Sunday afternoon in a three-piece suit with his resume in hand.

Schramm opened the door wearing Bermuda shorts and a baggy Hawaiian shirt. Wansley remembers thinking he looked like comedian Rodney Dangerfield.

“Hey, come on in,” Schramm bellowed as he held a tall glass of scotch in his right hand. “How about a drink?”

Wansley politely declined. The two sat down and began to talk. About an hour later, the doorbell rang.

It was Landry. The always dapper Cowboys coach looked like he had been working in his garage. He sat down and began to tell jokes. Schramm asked Wansley again if he wanted a drink.

“I’m thinking, damn, I’m here with two legends,” Wansley said. “One is trying to get me drunk, the other is telling me these jokes, which are pretty corny.

“I’m having a great time.”

Questions about Wansley’s qualifications never came up. The three just chatted. Schramm and Landry had a function to attend, so the Cowboys general manager said he would give Wansley a call when he got home around 7 so they could talk some more.

“Larry, this is Tex,” Schramm said when he called that evening.

“Yes sir, Mr. Schramm,” Wansley replied.

“None of that Mr. Schramm s—,” he shot back. “I’m Tex.

“I sure would like to have you on my team.”

Schramm told Wansley to go by the Cowboys offices the next day to get on the payroll. Wansley hung up the phone. His wife, Scharrol, asked what that was all about. He said he had taken a job with the Cowboys.

“Doing what?” she asked.

Wansley shook his head.

“I don’t know.”

A different perspective

Schramm was out of town that week. Wansley had to wait until he returned to learn his job description. That’s when Schramm told Wansley the players are Landry’s responsibility when they’re on the field and his when they’re not.

“We don’t worry about budget,” Schramm told him. “You need it, you buy it. We are cutting new ground here in the NFL. We’re starting something no one else has got.

“What I’m doing, kid, is giving you a blank canvas. Paint me a masterpiece.”

Schramm had one last word of advice.

“Don’t f— it up.”

Before Wansley left the FBI, he sat in on wiretaps with local mob gamblers who were running millions over the course of a weekend. In his first meeting with the players, Wansley recognized five players whose conversations were part of those wiretaps.

The players were being wined and dined by the subjects of those wire taps, who then asked the players to jump on the phone with their buddies. That’s when they would pump them for information about the upcoming game.

The players had no idea they were being duped. When Wansley met with each individually to let them know what was happening, they were scared to death. He then set up a meeting with the mob boss of the region to reach an agreement.

“I’m not here to bust you,” Wansley told the mobsters. “There are other people after you who hope to do that.

“I’m a member of the Cowboys now. I want you to sever those relationships. Stay away from them. Can we reach an agreement on that?”

An agreement was reached.

The Cowboys opened the 1983 season with two road games. The first regular season home game of Wansley’s tenure was in mid-September against the New York Giants.

Wansley learned that morning that one of the players was missing. He tracked him down to a bar on Northwest Highway and found him passed out on the owner’s couch.

By the time he got the player to the stadium for the trainers to get him ready for the game, he found out another player was missing. He had fallen asleep at the home of a woman he met the night before.

When Landry and Wansley met the next day, the Cowboys head coach asked how it went.

“I need to ask you a favor,” Wansley said.

“What’s that?” Landry asked.

Wansley told him what happened and suggested that the team stay in a hotel before home games the way they do on the road. Landry sat there for a second and gave it some thought.

“I think that’s something we can do,” Landry said.

It’s now a common practice around the NFL.

Cocaine was the drug of choice in the ‘80s. Coming from the world of law enforcement, it was simple. Get caught with drugs and you go to jail.

Wansley was coming at it from a different perspective now. He enrolled in a full inpatient drug treatment program at the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota to understand what addicts go through and determine how he could help.

Wansley would handle the logistics on road trips. In the spring of ‘84, the Cowboys held a regional combine in Seattle with the Seahawks, San Francisco and Buffalo. He found a hotel to host the 200 prospects.

It wasn’t until the players arrived that he realized the hotel was hosting a national drag queen’s coronation conference and ball at the same time. The young players were greeted by a gauntlet of whistling drag queens as they unloaded the bus to walk into the hotel.

Later that night, Wansley got a call about a disturbance. He found players lined up down the hall, with one young man telling him, “Hey, free hookers.”

It turned out a crooked agent hired a couple of prostitutes in an attempt to sign clients.

“It was all new,” Wansley said. “That’s the way it’s been from Day One.”

Another case closed

Along the way, Wansley developed and refined the player support system and established a security program adopted by the NFL that became the standard for all teams. He fitted Landry with body armor and stationed people around the Cowboys’ head coach after Landry received a death threat during a road game against the LA Rams in December 1986.

Wansley was given a leave of absence from the Cowboys to be the director of security for Whitney Houston’s European tour. He served as a director of corporate security for American Airlines, American Eagle and Trans World Airlines.

In that role, Wansley proposed a screening program for all passengers at U.S. airports in the late ‘90s. At the time, the Federal Aviation Administration had a policy that no one carrier could implement those measures unless all carriers agreed. One carrier refused.

The program was filed away. It was finally implemented two months after 9/11.

“I was proud, obviously,” Wansley said. “But also really pissed off. You had a situation where nearly 3,000 people died.”

Wansley was on the phone with the FBI as he watched United 175 slam into the South World Trade Tower. He helped with the investigation. He took part in several onsite orientations and assessments at Ground Zero in the following days and weeks.

The stench of decaying bodies. Wading through the mud to look for remains. Wansley was overwhelmed.

He noticed an older man showed up every day amid the rubble, methodically raking. He talked to no one. Wansley wondered about his story and was told he was a retired firefighter, looking for his two sons, who were also firefighters, who had been lost in the rubble.

“I cried,” Wansley said. “His anguish.

“I’ll never forget it.”

Bryan Wansley now works with the players the way his father once did while the elder Wansley focuses on corporate security. The morning of Dec. 4 when healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot on the streets of Manhattan, the elder Wansley was on the phone to his contacts, assessing if there was anything he needed to change in how he protects the Jones family.

The days of Wansley going undercover are long behind him. But he recently helped preside over an operation after getting a tip about ticket fraud.

Two former Cowboys players were offering special privileges like access to the owner’s club and other restricted areas during games. Customers would pay and then find they had no access to those areas and were unable to contact the players.

The Cowboys and the economic crime unit of the Arlington Police Department began an undercover operation that has resulted in charges and changes.

“It opened up this whole world of corruption and fraud and holes in the system that were exploited,” Wansley said. “Those holes have been plugged. This knocked off a whole lot of people and there are still cases pending.

“We also learned it’s prevalent in other cities. It started here, but now it’s around the league these last two seasons.”

Another case closed.

And this time, no one pointed a gun to his head.

Catch David Moore and Robert Wilonsky as they co-host Intentional Grounding on The Ticket (KTCK-AM 1310 and 96.7 FM) from 7-8 p.m. every Wednesday through the Super Bowl.

Find more Cowboys coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.